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Installing Laconica

This was published in 2009, the product has been superseded and the version dependent facts are over eight years old. This may not be as useful as it once was; the article talks about installing Laconica on an Ubuntu VM.

Is twitter or microblogging a service that would benefit from more active community management? It would seem that the people at friendfeed seem to thinks so but the people at Laconica have produced a package that allows for the hosting of a microblogging community.

Despite Peter Reiser’s statement (on his twitter feed at 1.41 am GMT 3rd Feb) that it installs on Solaris like a dream, I chose to install on Ubuntu Linux and there is a specific install page for Ubuntu at the Laconica site. It’s also useful to look at the README as it documents the pre-requisities and discusses the location of the site within the webserver’s root namespace in more adult fashion than the Ubuntu install page.

I installed version 0.6.3.

Critically you need Apache 2, MySQL Client Tools (& Server) and PHP 5, of which the latter two seem not to be installed on my version of Ubuntu (8.04 LTS Hardy Heron). (Actually I didn’t document my processes well enough and not everything was necessarily done in the correct order, so PHP might have been there, but the extensions weren’t.)

I had Apache 2 on my system, so I created a user to act as the Laconica administration user, ignored the suggestion to untar it in /var/www, the apache root and created a subdirectory.

It is best to now use the package manager to update MySQL & PHP, read the pre-requisites as you need some of the extensions which the Ubuntu package manager treats as separate packages. I found the Curl, MySQL and GD extensions. (I did this last and some stuff broke without the GD package.) I also re-installed the mod_rewrite package, as I had a problem and wasn’t sure of the cause.

Then its simple, wget and untar the package, edit the config file. The path parameter is relative so no preceding /, not ./

And up it comes, I have made a post, changed my avatar and checked the RSS, and I did it all in a Virtual Box image.

See also https://blogs.oracle.com/DaveLevy/entry/do_we_need_private_community